Welcome to Tirupur -- the City of Money and Moans
To foreign visitors like Matt Sears, a Mathematics teacher at Durham, "I'll start by saying that Tirupur is chock-a-block full of rich people: BMW's and Mercedes rolling down the dusty streets, gold ... all over the women who run these companies with their husbands, and schools built to teach the next generation how to manage these companies when the parents retire. iPhones, big houses, it's all in Tirupur and it's all built on the textile industry, specifically cotton t-shirts here .... Yesterday I took a tour of a t-shirt factory in Tirupur, Tamil Nadu, India. The Esstee Company. First, this company (and many other from what I can gather) are very responsible towards employees, process, and quality." What's more, "They keep worker health and happiness, environmentalism ... (with certifications in eco-friendliness, worker satisfaction, and the new C-TPAT ... meaning that their goods go much faster through US customs than other products...). That is pretty refreshing. I expected to see something fairly ugly (unhealthy conditions, child labour, etc.). ..."Indeed! Tirupur hosts the country's biggest and perhaps posh-est fitness club Energie Fitness Studio. Not long ago a school in Tirupur Disrict was for sale at price over $5million! Tirupur has the largest and fastest growing urban agglomerations in Tamil Nadu. The knitwear industry, which is the soul of Tirupur, has created millions of jobs. There are nearly about 3000 sewing units, 450 knitting units, hundreds of dyeing units and other ancillary units un-countable. It is called the Knitwear Capital of India (as it caters to famous brands retailers from all over the world like C&A, Reebok, Walmart, Diesel etc) - only Hosiery provides employment for about 300,000 people. Huge fortunes are being made off Tirupur's rise - revenues from its garment industry reportedly rose from 80 billion rupees (US $1.9 billion) in 2008 to 120 billion rupees ($2.6 billion) in 2009. According to NDTV-Profit (23 Feb 2010) - "Tirupur's knitwear industry is well on target to a strong export growth". Tirupur now accounts for about a quarter of all the export earnings of India's garment industry. And what a brand value Tirupur has earned in the West, someday the word Tirupur may emerge like Basmati or Darjeeling!
But, as if to follow suit Greek Mythology - where Pluto (the God of Wealth) was just the other name of Hades (the God of Underworld and the Dead) - Tirupur drew a little attention of the Media due to a reverse: "Suicides continue to soar high at an alarming rate in Tirupur district as 565 persons ended their lives in 2010 (calendar year) against the 491 suicides reported in 2009. Of the 565 persons, 352 were men, 168 were women, 15 were boys and the remaining girls." (The Hindu, Saturday, Jan 15, 2011, Suicide rate alarmingly high in Tirupur district by R. Vimal Kumar). Not only 'Knitwear Capital', Tirupur is all set to claim the title of 'The Suicide Capital' of India also.
But who are those poor souls and why the chose to die? India's largest English Daily "The Times of India" answers, "Gowthami limps into the all-women police station in the export hub of Tirupur with tears in her eyes. The 23-year-old mother of a little boy attempted to end her life swallowing a packet of powdered mosquito repellent coil, but miraculously survived. "I don't want to be alive. My husband says I look like a fat pig... he thrashes me quite often," she says. Every day, at least a dozen young couples ... land up at the Tirupur women's police station with acute suicidal tendencies." (405 deaths in 8 months: Tirupur turning suicide capital of TN, 2010-09-22). And likewise ends the analyses of the elite. As we find in the TEHELKA (Tirupur is booming. Then why have 400 of its residents committed suicide this year? By THUFAIL PT October 30, 2010) too, "The district administration, which started functioning from 22 February 2009 after Tirupur was carved out of Coimbatore and Erode districts, is scrambling to stem the tide of suicides. "We are alarmed by the rising number of suicides," says Collector C Samayamoorthy. "We had a brainstorming session and formed a committee to study the situation and prevent such cases." Alcoholism, family disputes, failure in love and extra-marital affairs are cited by experts as the main reasons for the spike in suicides."
But what the DM, C Samayamoorthy, never tried to gauge or guess, the TEHELKA team could sense. As for example - (1) Meanwhile, lying limp in her hospital bed, Maratakavalli explains that if her husband hadn't faced financial problems, and if the couple had enough time to spend together, she might have never contemplated suicide. "But both of us work for different companies from 9 am to 10 in the night," she says. "By the time we reach our rented room, we are too tired. We were struggling to make both ends meet. My husband ended up torturing me to escape his wretchedness." (2) Goutam, 33, who started earning his bread at the age of 17, has worked in all sections of the garment industry: stitching, pressing, printing and dyeing. He worked from 8 am to 10 pm and earned Rs. 200 a day. Goutam struggled to meet the financial needs of his family, as the cost of living is high in this industrial town. "Goutam took a loan from a local moneylender at a high interest rate," says his mother, Ponnamma. "After his son's birth, he again went through a serious financial crisis and wanted to take another loan. Goutam and his wife quarrelled over the issue a lot. On 13 September, both of them took their lives, abandoning their 18-month-old child." (3) In a similar tale, Laxmi, 32, had been working in the industry for 10 years. After migrating from Rameswaram 15 years ago, Laxmi found a co-worker as her life partner. They lived in a rented room with their three kids. Laxmi worked for one-and- a-half shifts, while her husband did two. "However, when Laxmi got a tumour in her stomach, they didn't have enough money for the surgery. She hanged herself two years ago," says her father Manova, who also works in the industry. Now, he looks after his three grandkids.
The wsws.org article: Wave of garment-worker suicides in Indian "boom" town by M. Kailasam and K. Sundaram (31 December 2010) provides some useful data: ? During the past year, the situation worsened. Whereas 495 garment workers and family members killed themselves in all of 2009, in the first six months of 2010 there were 350 suicides. And just in the three months of June through August 2010, some 250 workers took their own lives. ? For a 12-hour shift for operations such as cutting, stitching, tailoring and ironing the wage is normally around Rupees 190 ($4.22). For labelling it is Rs. 132 ($2.93); for folding of the ready-made apparels it is Rs. 131($2.93); for checking of finished garments it is Rs. 119 ($2.64) and for packing finished apparels it is a mere Rs. 106 ($2.35).
Besides, most workers have to stay in stifling small hired huts, many measuring 8ft by 8ft only, sans own toilet facility, very poor supply of drinking water etc. As a Frontline story writes, "Veeran earned Rs.125 for an eight-hour shift. He had to pay Rs.900 towards rent for a single-room house, Rs.25 for drinking water and Rs.15 for electricity every month" (Frontline, Sep. 25 - Oct. 08, 2010, Journey to nowhere by S. Dorairaj). Many a migrant worker has to settle for staying alone without bringing family members there. ("We have highlighted in the document the need for setting up housing facility for the textile workers by the government considering the high rentals in Tirupur, so that the migrant workers could bring their family to avoid loneliness and depression," Deputy Chief Labour Commissioner M.P.M. Sivakumar, who led the team, told The Hindu. - Need to implement dedicated welfare scheme for textile workers: report R. Vimal Kumar, 2010/12/01)
The organisations ostensibly meant for protecting the workers and leading the workers to fight capitalist oppression, the left parties and their trade unions, have degenerated; to them parliamentary manipulation and enjoying titbit share of 'power' are everything. This happened not only in states where they are in governmental power. In Tamil Nadu the CPI(M) has always been swinging between DMK led front and AIADMK led front. That party has taken globalisation, capitalist plunder and oppression for granted and where they are in governmental power they themselves implement the policies of globalisation. Whether or not they are in power they have become corrupted out and out. On July 2010, the CPI(M) state committee chief himself alleged that the CPI(M) MLA from Tirupur acted as a conduit of Rs. 2.5 million bribe from hosiery owners to the state labour minister in 2008. But that did not debar that MLA from continuing his role as a CPI(M) state committee member; the CPI(M) expelled him only in July 2010 when he organized felicitation for DMK Ministers going against the party order!
For millions of workers in the peripheral countries like China, India, Indonesia etc, capitalism, in its Globalisation phase, has resurrected its Dickensian aura. Sweatshops with total disregard to 8-hr-working-day rule steamrolling workers for 10-12 hrs a day or more, pitiably small wages, working and living condition almost similar to Engels's 1844 description in his Condition of Working Class in England, contract work with no job security and no health insurance benefits like ESI - these are the order of the day. Capitalism, as such, dehumanises - by total commodification of everything including persons, familial relations; by alienation, total loss of control over labour, labour process... etc; and in its sweatshop edition capitalism further erodes humanity, the working and living condition of workers engender poverty, ignorance, squalor, all kinds of physical and spiritual degeneration. The DM C Samayamoorthy didn't ponder over what breeds alcoholism, family disputes etc. But a worker, Ms Maratakavalli, understood what is there behind alcoholism, family disputes etc - "But both of us work for different companies from 9 am to 10 in the night.... By the time we reach our rented room, we are too tired. We were struggling to make both ends meet. My husband ended up torturing me to escape his wretchedness."
The workers fight against the dehumanising capitalism by organising them as a class, by consciously waging class struggle to replace capitalism by a planned society. The abject objective condition of life compels them to fight, and the fight, both in the realm of material life and ideas, changes them from ignorant victims to conscious makers of history. Today's self-destructors will one day destroy the society that dehumanise them.
A Post Script: Another city of Tamil Nadu, the Manchester of South India, Coimbatore, has also drawn attention for its high suicide rate. From The Hindu we get: Saturday, Jan 29, 2011 - Suicide prevention centre to be opened in Coimbatore today - Special Correspondent
Suicide Cases in Coimbatore City
2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011* |
327 | 371 | 343 | 15 |
* till (22.01.11)
Coimbatore: The City Police will provide counselling to persons with suicidal tendencies advising them to desist from resorting to such extreme decisions. ...
This too needs a probe by revolutionary activists.
Comments:
No Comments for View